Andy Stewart MacKay

Andy is a London-based writer and cultural historian. Currently he is writing an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s last novel ‘Between the Acts’. His latest book ‘The Story of Pop Art’ is a readable history of the first ‘postmodern’ art movement and will be published by Octopus Books in January 2020.

An engaging speaker and experienced lecturer, since 2005 he has taught art and cultural history at galleries, museums, schools and universities across London, Europe and the United States.

Acclaimed by The Spectator and Country Life, his first book The Angel of Charleston (British Library Publishing, October 2013) was an insightful biography of Bloomsbury housekeeper and confidante Grace Higgens (1903-1983) based on her unpublished letters and diaries.

A former archivist at The British Library in London, Andy co-catalogued the Harold Pinter archive, interviewed Dame Joan Plowright on her life in theatre for the Oral History Archive, co-organised exhibitions on T. S. Eliot and Sir Terrence Rattigan and researched the 2012 Cultural Olympiad exhibition Writing Britain.

Graduating in Art History from St Andrews University in Scotland, he studied Cultural Criticism at City University of London and Modernist Literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands.